Donald L. Kirkpatrick’s passing
last week at age 90 caused a moment of reflection for me. I never met the
man, but his ideas have been an ongoing subject of discussion and debate in my
professional life.
In a dark and smoke-filled office at a place called
Chemical Bank, near Wall Street in Manhattan, I was first told of
Kirkpatrick. In my first months as a “training” person, coming off an
unsuccessful stint as a high school English teacher, I was taking instructions
from a senior member of the training staff on his expectations for me to design
the evaluation of a new-hire training program. The man (whose name is
long-forgotten) explained to me the four levels of the Kirkpatrick Model:
- Level 1: Reaction. Did people like the course?
- Level 2: Learning. Did they learn the stuff they were supposed to learn?
- Level 3: Behavior. Were they able to perform the skills on the job?
- Level 4: Results. Did the application of the skills lead to improved business results?
The beautiful order and simplicity of the system
immediately appealed to me and set off a long-lasting moment of clarity. It was
then that I first understood the difference between what we do as school
teachers (teach people content, for no apparent reason, other than knowing all
of the stuff that all educated people know) and what we do in corporate
training functions (teach people skills, for the purpose of doing a job).
Over the years I participated in a number of task teams
charged with implementing a Kirkpatrick-esque system of evaluation. Typically,
the task team would spend 6-12 months creating a meticulously-crafted standard
Level 1 Evaluation instrument (smile sheet, if you will), before running out of
steam and disbanding. This very tendency points to the peril of Kirkpatrick –
people get so focused on following the Levels one at a time, starting with
Level 1, that they lose sight of why they were pursuing them in the first
place. My experience is supported by copious research that repeatedly shows
that almost all organizations have Level 1 instruments in place, and almost
none of them have Level 4 systems in place. This only serves to reinforce the
instinct within training types to expend too much energy thinking first of how
to make their classes or eLearnings aesthetically appealing or, even better,
fun!
My conception of why we train people has evolved
considerably in the intervening 20 years. Rather than a sequence, I prefer to
think of the Kirkpatrick Levels as a taxonomy. All evaluative activities fall
in to two categories: Measures that Training people care about and measures
that Business people care about. While there is value in the former, we should
emphasize the latter.
I know that Kirkpatrick himself understood this critique and
tried to get out in front of it. Today, his family’s company, Kirkpatrick Partners,
has consciously clarified and updated the presentation of the original concept
in the form of the New
World Kirkpatrick Model.
Being misunderstood and over-simplified is a fate that Donald
Kirkpatrick shares with Winston Royce, the “inventor” of the waterfall method
of managing large software development projects. In 1970, Royce wrote a highly
influential paper that is often cited as the basis of the Software
Development Life Cycle (SDLC), which today is routinely massacred by agile
development enthusiasts. His paper explicitly denounces the end-to-end,
one-way street that is waterfall planning, yet it spawned a multi-million
dollar cottage industry. Royce and Kirkpatrick both gave the world
ideas that were almost too elegant for their own good, so much so that many of those
espousing the method only considered the ideas themselves in a superficial
manner.
By any measure, Donald Kirkpatrick was a giant in the
field of learning and development. His evaluation concept was first presented
it as his PhD dissertation topic in 1959, and it was refined in many articles
and books in the ensuing 50 years. To those of us
steadfastly pursuing the holy grail of correlating training to business outcomes,
he has been a constant inspiration.
